A very small one from Metal Gear Solid 2. The Ninja gives Raiden a Gurlukovich uniform. When Raiden puts it on, his Codec team Hand Wave how it becomes unequpped when you bump into someone by saying it's 'a little too small'. The Colonel even fantasises about how Rose would look wearing the uniform, since he thinks it's in her size. At first I thought this was just a bit of silliness, but it actually makes a lot of sense - why would Raiden's uniform be too small for him, but would fit Rose? Simple - it's a woman's uniform. How would the Ninja get hold of a woman's uniform? By being a female Gurlukovich member herself. Olga even wears the standard Gurlukovich uniform in the Shell 1 core (where the special uniform that she gave Raiden was mandatory for security reasons), just to make sure we get that she doesn't have her special uniform any more.

Snake and Otacon's rather complicated handshake-y thing in MGS2 used to get on my nerves for years - it just doesn't seem like something Snake would have time for, what with him being the no-nonsense soldier type. However, it does seem like the something Otacon would come up with when they started up Philanthropy, and Snake would probably have gone along with it just to shut him up. When the handshake happens, Otacon's not far from Heroic BSOD - and Snake knows exactly what to do to wake him up.

Hardly. While Snake is indeed a no-nonsense soldier, Otacon is pretty much the only true friend he has and the only person he trusts completely. Actually, the very fact that Snake doesn't really do things like that normally only goes to show the strength of the bond the two share, which is why it's considered such a touching scene by many. You shouldn't underestimate the value of a real friend like Otacon for Snake who is constantly used as a tool or viewed as a "legend" by everyone who isn't either trying to shoot him or is only interested in his genes. However, I think the TRUE Fridge Brilliance -moment for most people comes from the realization that the handshake is the Konami Code. -Kan

So Metal Gear Solid 2 got a bad rep by some who were fans of MGS1 that wanted to be Solid Snake and instead got the infamous protagonist-bait-and-switch. I realized something though; it sounded like they felt betrayed by this. Used, even. Well, guess what? Snake was used as a pawn of the Patriots for years until he caught on to them; in a way, the game made them feel more like Solid Snake than they ever anticipated!

I recently read a theory about Sons of Liberty being almost entirely VR as a message to the player. The exact details aren't very clear to me, but the main thing that this Fridge Brilliance of mine made me realize is that, at the end of the game, Rose gets in the act alongside the Colonel as part of GW... yet I distinctly recall a conversation in Arsenal where Raiden mentions the Colonel's behavior to Rose and she mentions that she hadn't heard from the guy and, like Raiden, hadn't even met the guy. She said that she had been blindfolded and escorted to her current location. The whole thing just didn't seem to fit into the VR theory, which makes me think that, even if the rest of the events on the Arsenal Gear is messing with his head, the real Rose was there and had been helping him up to this point. - Drakohahn

Kojima has violated the One Steve Limit several times throughout the series, but having both the protagonists of MGS2 and 3, Raiden and Big Boss, named "Jack" seemed a bit off when both were released. But if you recall, Raiden was raised by Solidus... a character constantly venting his endless admiration for Big Boss fueled by living in his genetic shadow. Who's to say after "claiming him for his own" Solidus didn't name the little soldier "Jack" as a tribute to his clone father?

Another bit of Fridge Brilliance in his name - throughout the game, Solidus and Fortune are referred to as 'King' and 'Queen' by the other members of Dead Cell (And Ocelot). 'King', 'Queen', 'Jack'.

So would that make Snake 'The Ace?'

The Deuce. He is, after all, wild (uncontrolled).

I also got into MGS via TV Tropes, and having read the Never Trust a Trailer page, I thought that while it was clever to hide Raiden in the trailers for Sons of Liberty, it was a really jerk move to outright replace him with Snake in the cut scenes taken from the Plant chapter. Then I realized that they said that the entire mission was essentially Solid Snake going through Shadow Moses again, so Snake and Raiden were interchangable in the situation, and the whole thing was symbolic.

After The Reveal of Pliskin's identity, Raiden confronts the Colonel on knowing who he was, and when the book by Nastasha gets brought up, the Colonel gets very upset, telling Raiden he doesn't care about that piece of trash. When it happens, it could be seen that the Colonel was upset that Snake was still alive and involved in the terrorist attack two years before. But after it's revealed who, or rather, what the Colonel really is, a better explanation comes to mind. The Colonel, after all, is a manifestation of the Patriots. And the Patriots have a whole lot at stake that the truth about they and their actions never comes to light. The Colonel freaked out about the book, not because it showed Snake as a hero, but because it revealed far too much of the Patriots' actions than they'd ever want to become public.

Rosemary, in the language of flowers, symbolizes remembrance. Raiden's personal plot arc in the game is remembering his true past, and Rosemary plays a very important role in that (as his save handler, the repeated "do you know what day this is?" question, and as the sounding board to his childhood memories).

The design of Mother Base, with it's hexagonal/cell-shaped platforms and design, is deliberately designed to evoke the feeling of the Big Shell in terms of the game design and was almost definitely intentional on Kojima's behalf. In terms of the continuity of the games, however, it works perfectly in terms of how the now AI-led Patriots want to control and tailor history to suit their ends - and part of this is asserting their dominance over a wayward son of Big Boss, just like Zero and Cipher attempted in the 70's. In this sense, the entire Big Shell incident - entirely unnecessary because it's just a mask for Arsenal Gear - deliberately mirrors the destruction and downfall of Big Boss and Mother Base.

There's a codec call in MGS where Miller says that soldiers who got their training through VR don't understand the value of taking every opportunity they can to sleep. In MGS 2, Raiden is incredibly surprised about all the time that Snake spends sleeping.

Where in upstate New York did they load Metal Gear RAY onto that ship?

At one point, Pliskin mentions that the Big Shell lacks lifeboats, and that its far enough away from Manhattan to make swimming to it and back not an option for rescuing the hostages. Bear in mind that the Patriots orchestrated the reasons behind the development of the Big Shell as well as the takeover and eventual destruction of the Big Shell, which strongly implies that the Patriots intended to have the hostages killed when Arsenal Gear was activated.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy